Volunteering in Uganda

After 3 months in Kenya I spent another 3 months volunteering in Uganda. This time it was in a very remote area, so it was a totally different experience compared to the busy region of Mombasa.

 This is one of the class rooms, where I volunteered as a teacher.

 The African people in the remote countryside live still in mud houses.

 Though all is surrounded by beautiful nature and orchards.

Here you see some of my pupils.

 There you see the school from outside, just like a wooden hut.

Mainly, I taught maths and English in a Primary School. I really enjoyed to teach and be with the small children, who are very friendly and happy to meet a “musungu” (=white person). In addition I worked on developing a vegetable and fruit tree garden for the school. So I sponsored a variety of vegetable and fruit tree seeds, developed seedlings in a nursery bed and at the beginning of the rainy season we (= pupils of the higher classes, teachers and me) started to plant them.

In addition there were many other possibilities to help the poor. So I sponsored the school fees for 18 children (mostly orphans), who were not able to pay the small fee of about 15-20€ for one year. Furthermore I paid a hospital bill for a poor one and helped financially in some other cases.

Altogether it was an interesting experience to live in an area where there is still some natural bush and the people live very modest with most of them having traditional mud houses, water needs to be fetched from the well and power was only available in 3 houses of the village, which had solar panels installed. And of course almost all work is done manually with some very simple tools. So the people were busy with digging, planting, harvesting and fetching water for washing, cooking, cleaning and bathing.

Now I am back in the “high tech”-country Germany and realize how much we do with machines, work in dark fabrication halls and moreover how much hectic and stress we have here compared to the relaxed living style of the African people.

Reading the spiritual treasures motivated and inspired me to do these 6 months of volunteering in Africa. These precious teachings are available in a free offline version contained in the Cyberspace Ashram for Kriya Yoga.